A Polymathic Organisation develops a capacity to synthesise knowledge, experience and perspectives across domains to enable intelligent decision making and action. It's an organisational, not personal, capability.
Strategic Learning helps organisations navigate uncertainty, complexity and crises through collective learning. It shows how to surface reality, make sense together, imagine better futures, experiment, act, reflect and adapt in an iterative cycle.
The New Enlightenment extends the achievements of the Enlightenment but addresses its limits by recognising that understanding grows through analysis, experience, practice, perspective and participation, across cultures and disciplines to address our interdependent existential challenges.
Enlightened Enterprise is an approach to organising human activity across business, government and civic life. It connects knowledge across boundaries, clarifies purpose and responsibility, and helps people learn and act so enterprise creates value for organisations and the common good. serves.
Key Concepts
An enlightened approach to enterprise is based on some foundational concepts. Here you can find a curated selection of some of them. Some have been developed by the academy. Others are from referenced sources. Members get full access to all concepts.
Leading with Dignity by Donna Hicks shows leaders can recognise people’s worth, avoid dignity violations and build cultures where people feel respected, heard and able to contribute. It strengthening trust and relationships.
Price is a poor proxy for value in decision making. The Dignity Theory of Value also judges whether choices and systems strengthen dignity and support flourishing communities, future generations and the living world.
Collaboration Curation starts with a problem or opportunity, identifies who needs to learn and act together, and connects knowledge, experience and resources across boundaries. It's the capability for effective learning.
Symnoetic Intelligence emerges when people and AI think, reason and learn together. It connects human experience and judgement with AI’s patterns and reach, but keeps human purpose, agency and responsibility at its centre.
Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons helps people explore how today’s systems, emerging alternatives and transitional innovations interact. It links a preferred future with action in the present, revealing what needs to change, what can help the transition, and what is emerging.
Professor Michael C. Jackson’s Critical Systems Thinking helps choose and combine systems approaches to fit complex situations. It values multiple perspectives, questions how problems are framed and whose interests are served, and applies inquiry to improve conditions and address marginalisation.
Valueism calls for capitalism focused on financial and non-financial value creation for stakeholders, for lasting, widely shared prosperity and for human flourishing. Profit is a means, not the purpose itself.
Civic Sovereignty says people collectively hold the legitimate authority to shape the systems that govern their lives. Organisations and Institutions earn legitimacy by serving the people and the common good.
